Which is really too bad, as the new content is competently done and a lot of it is quite enjoyable. If you get a game over, it’s back to the beginning, which is very aggravating even on its own, but adding constant loading and disk swapping on top of having to play through the game again, makes it a slog. The Wonderland level alone takes up three disks, even after significant trimming! Worst of all, you start with three lives, with certain score thresholds awarding more, and get no continues. Every few seconds, the game freezes to load the next couple of seconds before pausing again for more loading. The game came on eight 3.5” floppies, and each disk has about 30 seconds of gameplay, and far more than that in loading. Unfortunately, Dirk’s greatest foe is the massive amount of loading times. Dirk, of course, gives chase in his Time Machine to stop Mordread and save his family and home. Mordroc’s sister, Mordread, who is basically just Mordroc with a feminine body (they didn’t even change the voice!), is quite angry with Dirk for having dispatched her brother, and in revenge, shrinks Dirk and Daphne’s home, along with Daphne, and takes them hostage. The plot is as stock as sequel plots come. While they are still technically impressive, the severe editing hurts them a bit, with many of the most bizarre and gorgeous moments not there to be seen, likely due to technical limitations of the home computers of the time. On one hand, it has a bit of decent new content, plus levels from DL2 that were cut for space from that port, including heavily trimmed versions of the Wonderland and Beethoven levels. The second and final of the home computer version expansions for the Dragon’s Lair franchise, Curse of Mordread is a game that clearly had high ambitions, but again, is held back by the technology of the time not quite being able to deliver. Still, this version is worth a look for hardcore fans, or at least pulling up a YouTube video of it just to see the extra content.ĭragon’s Lair III: The Curse of Mordread – Amiga, Atari ST, IBM PC, Macintosh (1992) Also, some of the new animation, especially the ending where Dirk and Daphne kiss, looks quite lousy. The labyrinth is very annoying, as it’s just a maze with no hazards or dead ends to avoid, although the death scene when you fail to pick a direction, which just shows Dirk run into a wall and somehow die is slightly amusing. They’re interesting, but not anything special. It featured more screens from the arcade game that couldn’t be fit on the original port, due to limited disk space, but it also featured some exclusive content that hasn’t been seen before or since.Ī few brand-new levels were created for this release, including a scene where a monster morphs out of a door knocker, a labyrinth/graveyard, and a new final battle with the shapeshifter. The story in this version is that a Shapeshifter (that Grim Reaper looking guy from the spinning socker bopper level) has kidnapped Daphne and taken her back to the castle, and Dirk must once again save her. The version of Escape from Singe’s Castle for Amiga was completely different from the one for 8-bit computers. It’s quite obsolete now, with the wide availability of HD arcade-perfect ports, but when it was time to release a follow up, things got interesting. It was far from perfect it’s hard to cram a laserdisc’s worth of content onto six 3.5″ floppies, so there were a lot of missing scenes and such, but it was leaps and bounds ahead of everything that had come before. For most of us however, this is a totally forgettable title.When Dragon’s Lair was ported to the Amiga, it was quite a technical achievement, since it was the first port of Dragon’s Lair to truly come close to replicating the original arcade version. So, I can only find it in me to recommend this game to hardcore Laserdisc adventure aficionados that simply can bear the lesser quality of this third title in the series. The animation is much shoddier, with a lesser palette of colors, with much fewer interesting background elements and also, with music and sounds that are again, immediately recognizable as cheesy, cheap. Unlike the Dragon's Lair NES version of the game, this one is not a platformer, it's the same mash up of story driven cartoon shenanigans but, unfortunately, the beautiful style of the original is replaced by a more budget look and feel. However, you're more of a button masher, and don't really have much of a say in how the story goes. The action on screen can be very diverse, with your protagonist always looking to dodge, fight, move, etc from a variety of situations. Just like the Laserdisc original, Dragon's Lair 3 is the same kind of game, it asks of you to be very careful at the action on screen and at the right moment press a determined number of buttons to keep the story going.
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